Just curious, since the “Friends” editing window has a regular table with columns for friend status (icon), username (friend), and alias (name), why can't it be sorted? I'd like to sort it by friend status, so that I could have a quick list of who in the list aren't mutual friends with me (one way or another). I thought all tables like this could be sorted, I guess not. I click on the column headers and nothing happens. I guess it would be a nice feature, in the future.

In fact I'm not real sure about the entire friends-editing interface. It works... but it doesn't seem as efficient or logically put-together as it could be. It mirrors almost exactly the Windows client's friends-editing window. It would be nice to see an approach without tabs, perhaps where you select a friend in the table and to the right would be a multi-line select box listing your friends groups, and one could select or deselect the groups that said friend was in (control-clicking to add them to multiple groups). The current group interface makes sense for when you're creating groups but it is a bit of a headache when you add new friends and then have to go through each group, find the new friends, and add them individually. Perhaps the group interface as it stands is better suited for just that initial creation of groups, and could be fit into a sheet dialog upon creation of a friends group?

It would also be nice if this updated friends interface allowed editing of friend colors more easily, without popping up a new dialog... it's a bit silly to have to delete and re-add a friend just to change their colors; that may be the way LiveJournal works but the client's frontend could make it seem more logical, no?

Speaking of innovating the front-end to improve the general iJournal experience, could there be a way to rename friend groups, possibly? Though then, the problem is all of the old entries with the old friend group. Perhaps through deleting and recreating? Or maybe just creating a new friends group, adding all of the same friends to it, and iJournal keeping a database of old friend groups that you have “renamed,” but still exist, and it could just not show those in the “New Entry” interface. Just an idea.. sometimes it seems futile getting through to the backend developers to add user-friendly features like this, thus it might be better to just innovate a client-side solution.

Friend statistics would also be nice. Just a little 'status bar' type approach at the top of the window, saying how many friends you have, what percentage are mutual, or you don't have on your list...

In any case, v1.49 is working great so far.. at least I think it's 1.49, I can't seem to find any reference to the version number in the “About...” box anymore..

Comments

My original plan was to enhance the UI to put the friends on the side of the browser window like an IM client's buddy list. this would allow grouping by your priv groups. However, this plan also involved listing the viewable posts above the browser window with threading of their responses. (This functionalty is not in the protocol) personally, at this point I just want to be able to obtain the number of responses a post has had so I can bold a pot subject when a new response comes in and bold a user in the friends list when they make new posts or a viewable post has a new response.

All still on the Drawing board.

Side note, Also looking for the best way to contact you directly concerning an LJ issue which I feel should go to you before I send it to the support area.

Feel free to email me, AIM/ICQ/MSN/Y!M me, comment here, comment on my journal, anything like that.. if anything, I love getting comments. Let me guess what you're going to talk about, though—my smiley set, and how they're terribly matched, how incorrectly some smilies have been applied due to the hierarchial mood setup and all of the new moods added since I made the set, several of them aren't really original, etc etc.. If you know how I can update them, I'd be glad to, and better yet if you have ideas for fixes/improvements and will do them, feel free. :)

Maybe 10 threads over a few months, as far as enhancement suggestions, but yeah.. I can't argue with that. Or, maybe we could actually make use of the "memories" function for bugs and enhancement suggestions. That might make a little more sense. And the todo list, like lj_dev does.